It’s something out of an Aldous Huxley novel. Berlin, Germany, is home to the first “multidisciplinary” approach to brothels using artificial women, which combine virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies. It’s called a cyber-brothel.
The concept of artificial women is hardly novel. But cyber-brothels are capitalizing on rapidly developing AI to make what creator Philipp Fussenegger hopes will be a “sustainable” model of “AI-enhanced silicone partners.” The business model features options to tailor the customer’s experience. The details are too graphic to describe, but unsurprisingly, they include the violent and degrading acts associated with pornography use.
Unlike AI “girlfriends,” cyber-brothels provide customers with robotically engineered, lifelike humanoids. Or, what Fussenegger calls “artificial companionship.” These robotic dolls are designed to speak, move, and interact in an almost human way.
And “almost” provides just enough ambiguity for cyber-brothels to skirt criminality and justify consciences. Since they do not involve “sex work,” they don’t require a brothel license; no other human being was involved in the physical transaction. And, since the prostitute was a robot, not an actual person, can it really be considered infidelity? How, clients reason, can they be cheating when no one else is involved? “If you are here,” says Cybrothel’s co-owner, Matthias Smetana, “the only person who can judge you is yourself.”
In Huxley’s Brave New World, human beings are engineered social products, sexual activity is a mere biological act severed from relational ties, and technology is the conduit of mind-numbing, control-inducing diversions. The creation of AI prostitution simultaneously realizes his imagination of all these dystopian predictions.
For two generations now, we have practiced the cultural experiment of severing of sex from relationships, of reducing human sexuality to a mere biological drive liberated from the burden of social expectations.
Set aside the initial shock of cyber-brothels, and it’s quite logical to our sex-severed society. We’ve simply never before had the technology to actualize it. Why wouldn’t society approve, indeed celebrate, a means of satisfying biological urges in a manner that “isn’t hurting anyone”?
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine )
Katie is the author of To Be a Woman: The Confusion Over Female Identity and How Christians Can Respond (B&H Publishing) and Humanity, part of the Theology for the People of God Series (B&H Academic).